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One of the nice visuals of 4th & Mayor is the animation and display of a simple area map whenever you view a place in the app. Unfortunately, most map controls, such as the Bing Maps control included with the platform, are highly sophisticated: they let you have a bunch of pushpins, gather information about ... 31 Jan 2012
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I can’t post a new component or library every day, but I can point you at other great blogs and folks on Twitter that would be super useful to app devs and teams building on the Microsoft stack. This afternoon I read another of Arturo Toledo’s amazing series on Windows Phone Design – and it’s ... 29 Jan 2012
Set your Windows Phone Mango app to have the Light, Dark, or inverted theme with just one line of code and this helper library, PhoneThemeManager. 25 Jan 2012
Please ship your next Windows Phone app or app update using this awesome GZipWebClient library by Morten Nielsen (NuGet, blog post, source) – it’s been out there since August and we should all be using this now for HTTP-heavy apps! The next update of my app is in the works and performance is significantly improved ... 22 Jan 2012
I’ve harped on this one a few times before in my Windows Phone Metro Design Guidelines post for devs. But it’s time for another helping! Metro Radio is a slick and functional Pandora application for the Windows Phone. Like many apps, there are plenty of small little UX things that could make it even better. ... 15 Jan 2012
A Windows Phone visual control that uses the camera to read a QR code. 14 Jan 2012
Back in April I shared my custom Windows Phone Emulator theme/skin files that made the emulator look like an AT&T phone, the Samsung Focus. I recently realized that the newer Windows Phone Marketing resources on the MSDN site include a much nicer looking chassis mock-up, without branding, and thought I would move to start using ... 12 Dec 2011
One of the fun projects I’ve been working on recently related to my app has been bringing online a cloud to handle sending push notifications processing. I’m using Node.js for this and have a ton of people enjoying the beta push experience right now: toasts, live tiles, etc. Tonight I pushed to GitHub ‘mpns’, a ... 7 Dec 2011
Today we pushed the button and published the November 2011 release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. This is a bug-fixing release and addresses a number of important issues as reported by customers on the product’s CodePlex site. For this release the team focused entirely on reported issues, important blockers for people, and we’ve ... 15 Nov 2011
A majority of the navigation throughout my application’s many pages and experiences are powered by the HyperlinkButton control. It’s fun and easy to data bind, and something I pointed out in a Channel 9 video that was being recorded this morning. I wanted to share this simple method with others – it’s so easy to ... 31 Oct 2011
One thing that’s surprisingly hard to do on the Windows Phone is take screenshots of your application when it is running. Here’s a really simple solution that I coded up while working with some customers – you just give it an interval of time and it’ll take screenshots every few seconds, storing the resulting image ... 12 Oct 2011
A helpful feature for developers and designers to overlay a metro-friendly grid on top of your Windows Phone application. 7 Oct 2011
I’ve been playing around with Node.js a little more recently and wanted to share a little short lesson I had. A quick little break from the phone client… As part of the cloud environment for my application, I have a service that dynamically resizes a given image from Foursquare into a Windows Phone tile size ... 5 Oct 2011
One of my favorite features in Mango is the ability for developers to let users pin a deep linking secondary tile to their start screen. It’s a simple concept but really opens up a lot of new opportunities for apps-within-an-app, shortcuts to oft-used functionality, plus many other innovations. In 4th & Mayor, I use these ... 27 Sep 2011
It’s an exciting week here at //BUILD/, things are off to a good start. Now that the sessions are public, I wanted to let my readers know that I am giving a talk on Friday about Windows Phone Performance. Windows Phone application performance and optimization 9/16/11 from 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM Room: Marriott Orange ... 13 Sep 2011
We’ve now shipped the August 2011 release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit, a key ingredient in preparing a great ‘Mango’ app. There are new controls, many bug fixes, great new localization features, and more in this pack of components. You can download the new release straight from the CodePlex site at http://silverlight.codeplex.com/ – ... 17 Aug 2011
I’ve gotten enough questions about the “About” page in my app that I figure it’s time to share it. Is this the best way to do it? No clue… last year when I started building my first app, this is how I decided to write the about page in a few unique ways, so here ... 7 Jul 2011
One of the nice new features in the 7.1 release of Windows Phone for developers is ProgressIndicator support right within the app platform, removing the need in many situations for the Silverlight-based PerformanceProgressBar control that I created some time ago. (The PerformanceProgressBar was a decent performance improvement over the stock ProgressBar in the first release ... 7 Jul 2011
Did you know that the folks working on Silverlight for Windows Phone performance have setup a great blog? Spearheaded by one of our program managers, Rohan, the blog is a place where we’ve been putting together excellent guidance on the upcoming Mango release. Now that Beta 2 of the Mango developer tools are out, this ... 5 Jul 2011
The latest version of 4th & Mayor for the Windows Phone is now available. v2 adds great new features, performance improvements, check-in photos, and more! 28 Jun 2011
I took a few minutes today to build and share this updated set of assemblies that are Mango beta-compatible for phone developers. These can also be used with the RTM of phone, SL3, etc. There were some XAML syntax errors in code that was previously not exercised, oops. [ZIP, 518K] Silverlight Unit Test Framework Assemblies ... 9 Jun 2011
Just checking in with folks, wanted to share a little of what I’ve been up to, and lay the foundation for what I hope to be another set of good blog posts. Work’s been a fun challenge recently, we’re working hard on plenty of things and I just haven’t been able to keep the blog ... 7 May 2011
Please, oh please, take the time to fill out the evaluations – whether you loved or hated the talk, or even left early. The data’s good to have and the only other thing we can really go off of to understand a session is the tweets that come during and after the talk. MIX 11 ... 17 Apr 2011
MIX was a blast this year. The excitement sure was palpable around the Windows Phone, and it’s always just quite amplified by the Las Vegas energy and the strong, passionate community that we have. My Windows Phone app performance talk is now online, so check that out if you weren’t able to attend. I’ll be ... 15 Apr 2011
I’ve received a lot of people asking around on Twitter and other places for the emulator theme that I use with the Windows Phone developer tools. I created these one slow evening at home, sharing on my blog now. Use at your own risk, it’s unofficial to replace this sort of thing. What it looks ... 5 Apr 2011
In my WP7 app I've enabled anonymous feedback via an opt-in choice for users, and here I talk some about that and look at the data. 31 Mar 2011
Here's my developer's guide to improving the design of your Windows Phone apps. Let's make our apps look great! 25 Mar 2011
Just over a week ago, a new foursquare feature was released for nice leaderboards. WP7 is fast - I added the feature in about 30 minutes. 20 Mar 2011
I'm pleased to announce that my foursquare app for Windows Phone, 4th & Mayor, is now available on the Windows Phone Marketplace. 20 Mar 2011
I wanted to share info on a few of the upcoming talks that I will be giving at a few conferences. If you’re thinking of attending any of these, I think there will be plenty to learn! MIX 2011 (April) At Microsoft’s own MIX 11 conference in Vegas, I will be presenting on Windows Phone ... 16 Mar 2011
I'm developing an unofficial Foursquare app for Windows Phone that will be the basis of a number of upcoming technical blog posts, conference talks, and more. 10 Mar 2011
With some quick re-templating action, you can use AutoCompleteBox from the toolkit in a Panorama or Pivot control page for Windows Phone. This is one of the key customer asks from folks developing WP7 apps that I hear often. The good news is that this can be accomplished with simple re-templating of the AutoCompleteBox control, ... 9 Mar 2011
Here is a simple TitleTemplate for the Windows Phone Pivot control that enables text wrapping. 21 Feb 2011
Announcing the Feb 2011 release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit, adding tilt and performance progress bars, and addressing customer-reported issues. 16 Feb 2011
Just a few notes: new phone tools, an upcoming phone toolkit, source is out already, and other things... 6 Feb 2011
Here’s a quick UX improvement to the scroll viewer that adds a visual indicator for the user showing them briefly the scroll bars. Interestingly, the actual phone operating system does have this concept of a hint, so I think it’s a smart addition any developer should consider while polishing their app before submission to the ... 5 Dec 2010
I’ve updated my extended HyperlinkButton control for Windows Phone 7 to now support all the key tasks. This makes it really easy to build up about pages, user profiles, and of course fully supports data binding. So the core phone tasks work well with this. Same story, you set the Tag to be effectively the ... 3 Dec 2010
A quick and easy HyperlinkButton-derived control for Windows Phone that lets you set the Tag to an e-mail or web address and get the associated task goo for free. 30 Nov 2010
Today Will Faught from the Silverlight Toolkit team blogged about the transitions built into the latest release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. Good stuff (Will was the developer for this feature). In case you haven’t opened up the sample app that came with the phone kit, and just want to see at a ... 16 Nov 2010
Last week I gave a multi-part series on Windows Phone development at the Øredev conference in Malmö, Sweden. Here is the sample app that was built throughout the talk. It’s a simple app that lets you pick a photoset from Flickr for a given user, then browse the photos in a nice slideshow format (swipe ... 16 Nov 2010
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